which part of 'single transistor' was it that you didn't get ?
ECL requires quite a bit more than just one transistor iirc... I could be wrong, but I really don't think so.
Just from memory I think that's at least two transistors in push pull and a symmetrical power supply + a bunch of resistors to get things set up 'just so'.
In fact, it is a spiral, just like the 'loop' in most lightbulbs that you can see is a spiral. The simple reason for that is that there isn't room enough in a small triode to pack in the wire as a continuous segment at the voltage that the filaments run at the currents are high enough that you need an appreciable length of wire to get to the required resistance.
Just for you I've dug you up a picture of what an early model heater would have looked like:
The two types of tubes that are still in common use either use the tungsten filament as described above (typically for higher power applications) or an indirect system where the heating filament is 'wrapped' by a small tube coated with some oxide, in this case the electron emission is secondary.
Slasdot was labelled 'news for nerds', last I checked, and your remark about the 'hot cathode' being in contrast to there being no filament at all does not contradict anything I said before.
Also, it's hard to tell one anoymous coward from another.
Chink, gook and slant, I can clearly see why they would be offensive, they have a derogatory 'feel' to them, to me chinaman is just an indication of origin/location and gender, no more than that. A way to indicate a particular person in a group of people when you know their origins but not their names for instance. Would 'person from china' be more acceptable ? Chinese man ? (which probably would be the one I would choose if I didn't have this discussion in the first place)
And yes, people that did not know my name but that had figured out where I came from have called me dutchman, and I had absolutely no problem with that, since after all, I'm dutch and male.
Also, and maybe that's where the misunderstanding comes from I'm not from or in the US and I'm not aware of what is derogatory there, but the English language is spoken in more places than America and most derogatory terms are a 'contract' between the offender and the offendee, in other words, to the rest of the world your argument may not make sense, they may not even realize that an insult was meant or received. A bit like voodoo, you have to believe in it for it to hurt. This leads to all kinds of strife, hence my 'lighten up'.
Negro = person with black skin to some, but derogatory to others, in Spanish it still simply means black, this could potentially get native spanish speakers into a lot of trouble depending on the location...
Before you go and label something derogatory you should demarcate the context, since what is derogatory and what is not varies quite a bit according to culture and location.
You're an anonymous coward *and* an idiot, now that's an interesting combination.
Vacuum tubes contain a tungsten filament that is heated up using a (typically) 6.3 V power source totally independent of the rest of the circuit.
This current causes the filament to heat up to roughly orange in the visual spectrum and it will have a cloud of electrons boiling around it. This is also known as a 'hot' Cathode, in that it produces the desired effect by heating up a piece of metal. The byproduct of this process is a lot of infrared radiation, a good part of which gets absorbed by the glass enclosure of the tube, which tends to get too hot to handle in most operating conditions.
The grid controls the flow of the electrons between the cathode and the anode (usually a plate around the assembly or somewhere near the top), you can have multiple grids (like a transistor with multiple bases, but the interaction would be slightly different) if you want but since this article is about the transistor we can pretend that tubes only have one 'grid'. The reason it is a grid (and not a plate) is because the electrons actually need to pass *through* the grid, on their way from the Cathode to the Anode. How many of them will get there depends on the voltage present on the grid input terminal of the tube.
Hot Swap was an apparently misguided attempt at humour, I apologise for the fact that it went over your head. To insult you no further I will not attempt to explain the joke.
In order to drive a transistor 'open' the fastest way is to drive the base into saturation wrt to the emitter, it will cause the 'on' state to be achieved in a time that is only limited by the capacitance of the transistor, the ability of the supply to deliver the current and the output impedance & capacitance of the driving circuit.
Anything less will cause the transistor to end up below the 'on' state, and will cause the parasitic capacitor that is present in every transistor BE junction to charge up at a lower rate. Too high a voltage is not good (the magic smoke tends to disappear), VBE usually has a very well defined maximum rating, too little and you won't reach the 'on' state so you'll waste time and generate heat.
You could simplify that (grossly) by saying that switching a transistor on goes the quickest if you connect the base to a voltage that is coming from a source with a very low RI, and that is low enough that the transistor will survive the event.
Saturation simply means that ICE will not increase if you further increase the VBE, in other words the transistor is as 'on' as it will get. Typical base-emittor saturation voltages are about 650 mV for silicon and about 150 mV for Germanium, but since 99.99% of all transistors are made of silicon you may as well ignore that bit:), digital electronics nowadays commonly drive to 3V for 'on' (sometimes even lower), typical breakdown voltages for the BE junction are about twice that.
The above applies to junction transistors, not to FETs, the same basic principles still apply (it's all physics after all) but the construction of a FET is radically different from a 'regular' transistor, the main basic difference is that the 'gate' (which is the equivalent of the base in a regular transistor) is not galvanically coupled to the drain (the equivalent of the collector) or the source (the equivalent of the emitter).
The net effect of that is that no actual current flows between gate and source, you're simply charging the capacitor that sets up the field that will allow current to flow between drain and source.
In practice, of course transistors (of any type) not only need to be switched 'on' but also off, and this is why the voltage swing is crucial, a lower swing allows faster switching (as well as lower power losses).
For P-variety transistors please reverse all the voltages above:)
Thank you for your amazing display of attitude, your assumption about how little I understand about the fundamental principles of electronics is duly noted and quite possibly totally off base.
The fact that you can use a transistor in two modes, as a switch where you basically saturate the device to get minimum 'on' resistance and maximum switching speed vs an analogue mode where you aim for the linear part in the curve is of course totally obvious, but you can actually just use transistors in the 'digital' only mode, in other words trying to minimize as much as possible the time spent in the analog domain where resistance and heat are king & queen. You'll never avoid that completely which is why a digital device built up out of transistors will generate some heat.
To take it one level further, all electronics devices are analog when you look at large quantities of electrons passing through them, they all exhibit capacitance, resistance and inductance but as soon as you take it down to very small quantities of electrons the properties of most components change quite dramatically. These effects are increased when switching faster.
A true 'digital' domain does not exist, except maybe if we ever get to the holy grails of super conductance and single electron switches, or possibly widespread use of photonic devices for computation.
Until then the 'analog' byproducts of using transistors as switches (heat and maximum switching speed) will be with us.
So, as to your 'the transistor actuates levels, not states' you can take it and run with it, if you use a transistor as a switch you ignore the analog portion as much as you can get away with (mostly as a function of switching time) and when you do analog you try to stay in the non-clipping portion of the output curve.
the 'wear' that tubes are subject to is twofold, first minute bits of air enter the glass enclosure over time and second (helped by the first) the glowing spiral that produces the electrons that carry the current in a tube wears out just like any other lightbulb (of which the vacuumtube is really just a special purpose cousin).
And yes, the lack of wear is a significant plus for the transistor, in fact a point could probably be made for the development of redundancy and 'hot swap' (tubes run hot to the touch) at a much earlier stage. Not to mention the power bill you'd receive if your average PC was tube powered. You'd likely have to live right next door to a power plant too:)
I strongly disagree that the invention of the transistor 'led to all electronics', no offense to your grandad.
The transistor is part of electronics, and electronics was quite well developed by the time the transistor came along. There were already steps towards miniturization using vacuum tubes as small as 3/8" across and only about 3/4" high, which was not that much larger than the first transistors. There were plenty of tubes that carried more than one circuit within the glass enclosure, so in effect they would already be 'integrated circuits' of sorts.
The transistors main contribution was the fact that it was 'solid state', no glow current needed (so much less power consumption, which in turn allowed much further miniaturization) and the fact that they could directly switch current at voltages that could drive devices directly instead of through large bulky transformers. All the rest (thin film, the fet and so on) followed from there but are also just 'chapters' in the book of electronics.
The basics are:
- electromechanics (wiring, switches, relays) - passive components (resistors, capacitors, coils, diodes, etc) - active components (transistors, tubes, various variations on the transistor) - integrated circuits (which is a subbranch of active components)
Relays, interestingly are also 'active' components in a sense.
if musicians can't tell tubes from transistors in double blind tests then I'm afraid that just like 'touch' in pianists it's a load of bull. It's a bit like saying you have a favorite kind of distortion that is unique to some component or other. There is no such thing, frequency response is a measurable quantity, and if two devices perform indistinguishable then they may as well be the same thing as far as the consumer is concerned. That 'tubes' sound different than transistors is taken for granted (but even there you can get awfully close with properly tuned FET end stages and god forbid an output transformer just to get the right kind of destruction (sorry, distortion) of the signal).
There used to be a guy here writing for a so called audiophile magazine that claimed that he could hear the individual stair steps of a CD quality digitized audio stream:)
I think many of these claims are just made to give the claimant some kind of status that they do not deserve. Anybody older than 35 making those claims in all likelihood no longer has the ears required to make such statements anyway, a baby or a dog, that's a different matter, their ears are much better than the average audiophiles, but of course they can't justify the expense (nor do they have the attitude).
analog is obvious, I'm thinking more along the lines of a digital 4 bit code lock built out of individual transistors. Maybe we'll give rdl a pass too:)
That has absolutely no bearing on the invention of the transistor itself and it demeans his co-inventors who had nothing to do with Shockleys beliefs. Also, please consider that racism was much less frowned upon in the 50's of the previous century and that plenty of those oldies just never saw the error of their ways, which is unfortunate but understandable if you look at it from a slightly different perspective. If someone has been behaving in a certain way for a good portion of their lives it becomes a direct onslaught to their identity to ask of them to change. Many religious people have similar issues, they've been living the lie for too long to let go of it, but we don't have as much of a problem with that as we do with racism (even though the number of people afflicted and the damage levels are probably comparable).
I've been called a dutchman plenty of times, which is no surprise because I am one, and I don't think it is insulting (other than in the context of being associated with our horrible politics towards foreigners that want to live here there is nothing particularly disgraceful about being dutch).
Since Chinese people refer to *ALL* foreigners on a regular basis as 'kwailo' (or however you spell it) I hardly think they would object to being called 'chinaman', after all, that is just a descriptive.
The politically correct 'I WANT TO CONTROL THE WORDS YOU USE' crowd really should learn to lighten up a bit and not take themselves so seriously. If a chinaman comes forward and complains with a motivation as to why he/she feels insulted by this term then that would be early enough to adapt, until that time I don't think they need everybody and their brother to speak for them.
they lost their near monopoly. IBM used to be the dominant force in enterprise computing. Basically there were three parties at the time, IBM, Sperry-Rand and Data-General, roughly corresponding to Microsoft, Apple and Linux today in terms of marketshare. It took a decade and a half of consistent decline and a lot of kicking and screaming by IBM and it's fanboys of days long gone before the hold they had over the market was finally broken. Then there was a rash of 'mini' and PC based solutions, the enabler of which was - ironically - IBM's own PC and the products of a little upstart named Compaq, powered by todays 600 Lbs gorilla Microsoft.
the interesting thing here is that google does not seem to have learned *anything* from the youtube/google video lesson. Instead of buying the established market leader and making the best of it they have now decided to go and try to unseat the market leader. This will fail, after which said market leader will be in a *much* stronger position. Or maybe wikipedia wasn't for sale:) Or maybe google doesn't like the creative commons much because it stops them from 'owning' the product.
breaking news: phones can play mp3's... so the phone is *both* media player and cellphone. Amazing isn't it ?
In other words, it makes perfect sense to have a large flash in your cellphone. Parent was talking about upgrading a windows based phone, NOT an iphone.
You'd have to filter out the 'dead' (fissioned) material because otherwise you'd be running a very real risk of giving a patient a wrong dose. Most of this stuff is done on a milligrams / bodyweight basis, stockpiling it for any length of time would throw off the dosage schemes in a terrible way.
exactly. This ISP should lose common carrier status immediately. They can no longer claim that they are just 'passing on the data', as of today they are 100% liable for the effects of *any* traffic on their networks.
it'd be hard to bomb them into the stone age though:) Joking aside, I wonder if it wouldn't be easier for the iranians to rent a bit of time on EC2 or one of it's ilk.
And that tends to change on how you define an embryo. According to some an embryo is a fertilized ovum, according to others it is a partically developed organism that stands a fair chance of being carried to term. The line is blurry and as with all of natures works it defies definition and can not be caught in a simple binary category. It's a continuum, just like 'tall' and 'hot'. Some collections of cells are more of an embryo than others, with a 'peak' of 'embryoness' somewhere in those magical 9 months. A born baby is not an embryo, a fertilized ovum probably also isn't one.
Slashdot Mirror
which part of 'single transistor' was it that you didn't get ?
ECL requires quite a bit more than just one transistor iirc... I could be wrong, but I really don't think so.
Just from memory I think that's at least two transistors in push pull and a symmetrical power supply + a bunch of resistors to get things set up 'just so'.
Please enlighten me oh anonymous expert...
In fact, it is a spiral, just like the 'loop' in most lightbulbs that you can see is a spiral. The simple reason for that is that there isn't room enough in a small triode to pack in the wire as a continuous segment at the voltage that the filaments run at the currents are high enough that you need an appreciable length of wire to get to the required resistance.
Just for you I've dug you up a picture of what an early model heater would have looked like:
http://www.thevalvepage.com/valvetek/heater/fig4.gif
and a few more recent types:
http://www.thevalvepage.com/valvetek/heater/fig5.gif
The two types of tubes that are still in common use either use the tungsten filament as described above (typically for higher power applications) or an indirect system where the heating filament is 'wrapped' by a small tube coated with some oxide, in this case the electron emission is secondary.
Slasdot was labelled 'news for nerds', last I checked, and your remark about the 'hot cathode' being
in contrast to there being no filament at all does not contradict anything I said before.
Also, it's hard to tell one anoymous coward from another.
Have a really nice day.
Chink, gook and slant, I can clearly see why they would be offensive, they have a derogatory 'feel' to them, to me chinaman is just an indication of origin/location and gender, no more than that. A way to indicate a particular person in a group of people when you know their origins but not their names for instance. Would 'person from china' be more acceptable ? Chinese man ? (which probably would be the one I would choose if I didn't have this discussion in the first place)
And yes, people that did not know my name but that had figured out where I came from have called me dutchman, and I had absolutely no problem with that, since after all, I'm dutch and male.
Also, and maybe that's where the misunderstanding comes from I'm not from or in the US and I'm not aware of what is derogatory there, but the English language is spoken in more places than America and most derogatory terms are a 'contract' between the offender and the offendee, in other words, to the rest of the world your argument may not make sense, they may not even realize that an insult was meant or received. A bit like voodoo, you have to believe in it for it to hurt. This leads to all kinds of strife, hence my 'lighten up'.
Negro = person with black skin to some, but derogatory to others, in Spanish it still simply means black, this could potentially get native spanish speakers into a lot of trouble depending on the location...
Before you go and label something derogatory you should demarcate the context, since what is derogatory and what is not varies quite a bit according to culture and location.
that's really funny that you should say that, it was one of the things I was wondering about while writing some of the other replies in this thread.
:)
I'd hate to think of a 1Gb dram based on any kind of tube technology though
But maybe we'd have core memories assembled by nano machines instead, we'll never know...
You're an anonymous coward *and* an idiot, now that's an interesting combination.
Vacuum tubes contain a tungsten filament that is heated up using a (typically) 6.3 V power source totally independent of the rest of the circuit.
This current causes the filament to heat up to roughly orange in the visual spectrum and it will have a cloud of electrons boiling around it. This is also known as a 'hot' Cathode, in that it produces the desired effect by heating up a piece of metal. The byproduct of this process is a lot of infrared radiation, a good part of which gets absorbed by the glass enclosure of the tube, which tends to get too hot to handle in most operating conditions.
The grid controls the flow of the electrons between the cathode and the anode (usually a plate around the assembly or somewhere near the top), you can have multiple grids (like a transistor with multiple bases, but the interaction would be slightly different) if you want but since this article is about the transistor we can pretend that tubes only have one 'grid'. The reason it is a grid (and not a plate) is because the electrons actually need to pass *through* the grid, on their way from the Cathode to the Anode. How many of them will get there depends on the voltage present on the grid input terminal of the tube.
Hot Swap was an apparently misguided attempt at humour, I apologise for the fact that it went over your head. To insult you no further I will not attempt to explain the joke.
In order to drive a transistor 'open' the fastest way is to drive the base into saturation wrt to the emitter, it will cause the 'on' state to be achieved in a time that is only limited by the capacitance of the transistor, the ability of the supply to deliver the current and the output impedance & capacitance of the driving circuit.
:), digital electronics nowadays commonly drive to 3V for 'on' (sometimes even lower), typical breakdown voltages for the BE junction are about twice that.
:)
Anything less will cause the transistor to end up below the 'on' state, and will cause the parasitic capacitor that is present in every transistor BE junction to charge up at a lower rate. Too high a voltage is not good (the magic smoke tends to disappear), VBE usually has a very well defined maximum rating, too little and you won't reach the 'on' state so you'll waste time and generate heat.
You could simplify that (grossly) by saying that switching a transistor on goes the quickest if you connect the base to a voltage that is coming from a source with a very low RI, and that is low enough that the transistor will survive the event.
Saturation simply means that ICE will not increase if you further increase the VBE, in other words the transistor is as 'on' as it will get. Typical base-emittor saturation voltages are about 650 mV for silicon and about 150 mV for Germanium, but since 99.99% of all transistors are made of silicon you may as well ignore that bit
The above applies to junction transistors, not to FETs, the same basic principles still apply (it's all physics after all) but the construction of a FET is radically different from a 'regular' transistor, the main basic difference is that the 'gate' (which is the equivalent of the base in a regular transistor) is not galvanically coupled to the drain (the equivalent of the collector) or the source (the equivalent of the emitter).
The net effect of that is that no actual current flows between gate and source, you're simply charging the capacitor that sets up the field that will allow current to flow between drain and source.
In practice, of course transistors (of any type) not only need to be switched 'on' but also off, and this is why the voltage swing is crucial, a lower swing allows faster switching (as well as lower power losses).
For P-variety transistors please reverse all the voltages above
Thank you for your amazing display of attitude, your assumption about how little I understand about the fundamental principles of electronics is duly noted and quite possibly totally off base.
The fact that you can use a transistor in two modes, as a switch where you basically saturate the device to get minimum 'on' resistance and maximum switching speed vs an analogue mode where you aim for the linear part in the curve is of course totally obvious, but you can actually just use transistors in the 'digital' only mode, in other words trying to minimize as much as possible the time spent in the analog domain where resistance and heat are king & queen. You'll never avoid that completely which is why a digital device built up out of transistors will generate some heat.
To take it one level further, all electronics devices are analog when you look at large quantities of electrons passing through them, they all exhibit capacitance, resistance and inductance but as soon as you take it down to very small quantities of electrons the properties of most components change quite dramatically. These effects are increased when switching faster.
A true 'digital' domain does not exist, except maybe if we ever get to the holy grails of super conductance and single electron switches, or possibly widespread use of photonic devices for computation.
Until then the 'analog' byproducts of using transistors as switches (heat and maximum switching speed) will be with us.
So, as to your 'the transistor actuates levels, not states' you can take it and run with it, if you use a transistor as a switch you ignore the analog portion as much as you can get away with (mostly as a function of switching time) and when you do analog you try to stay in the non-clipping portion of the output curve.
the 'wear' that tubes are subject to is twofold, first minute bits of air enter the glass enclosure over time and second (helped by the first) the glowing spiral that produces the electrons that carry the current in a tube wears out just like any other lightbulb (of which the vacuumtube is really just a special purpose cousin).
:)
And yes, the lack of wear is a significant plus for the transistor, in fact a point could probably be made for the development of redundancy and 'hot swap' (tubes run hot to the touch) at a much earlier stage. Not to mention the power bill you'd receive if your average PC was tube powered. You'd likely have to live right next door to a power plant too
I strongly disagree that the invention of the transistor 'led to all electronics', no offense to your grandad.
The transistor is part of electronics, and electronics was quite well developed by the time the transistor came along. There were already steps towards miniturization using vacuum tubes as small as 3/8" across and only about 3/4" high, which was not that much larger than the first transistors. There were plenty of tubes that carried more than one circuit within the glass enclosure, so in effect they would already be 'integrated circuits' of sorts.
The transistors main contribution was the fact that it was 'solid state', no glow current needed (so much less power consumption, which in turn allowed much further miniaturization) and the fact that they could directly switch current at voltages that could drive devices directly instead of through large bulky transformers. All the rest (thin film, the fet and so on) followed from there but are also just 'chapters' in the book of electronics.
The basics are:
- electromechanics (wiring, switches, relays)
- passive components (resistors, capacitors, coils, diodes, etc)
- active components (transistors, tubes, various variations on the transistor)
- integrated circuits (which is a subbranch of active components)
Relays, interestingly are also 'active' components in a sense.
if musicians can't tell tubes from transistors in double blind tests then I'm afraid that just like 'touch' in pianists it's a load of bull. It's a bit like saying you have a favorite kind of distortion that is unique to some component or other. There is no such thing, frequency response is a measurable quantity, and if two devices perform indistinguishable then they may as well be the same thing as far as the consumer is concerned. That 'tubes' sound different than transistors is taken for granted (but even there you can get awfully close with properly tuned FET end stages and god forbid an output transformer just to get the right kind of destruction (sorry, distortion) of the signal).
:)
There used to be a guy here writing for a so called audiophile magazine that claimed that he could hear the individual stair steps of a CD quality digitized audio stream
I think many of these claims are just made to give the claimant some kind of status that they do not deserve. Anybody older than 35 making those claims in all likelihood no longer has the ears required to make such statements anyway, a baby or a dog, that's a different matter, their ears are much better than the average audiophiles, but of course they can't justify the expense (nor do they have the attitude).
analog is obvious, I'm thinking more along the lines of a digital 4 bit code lock built out of individual transistors. Maybe we'll give rdl a pass too :)
That has absolutely no bearing on the invention of the transistor itself and it demeans his co-inventors who had nothing to do with Shockleys beliefs. Also, please consider that racism was much less frowned upon in the 50's of the previous century and that plenty of those oldies just never saw the error of their ways, which is unfortunate but understandable if you look at it from a slightly different perspective. If someone has been behaving in a certain way for a good portion of their lives it becomes a direct onslaught to their identity to ask of them to change. Many religious people have similar issues, they've been living the lie for too long to let go of it, but we don't have as much of a problem with that as we do with racism (even though the number of people afflicted and the damage levels are probably comparable).
Makes me wonder how many of todays 'geeks' have ever had a single transistor in their hands, much less done anything useful with it.
Anybody who has held a soldering iron and done something digital with single transistors please raise your hand ? Vacuum tubes ? Relays ?
I've been called a dutchman plenty of times, which is no surprise because I am one, and I don't think it is insulting (other than in the context of being associated with our horrible politics towards foreigners that want to live here there is nothing particularly disgraceful about being dutch).
Since Chinese people refer to *ALL* foreigners on a regular basis as 'kwailo' (or however you spell it) I hardly think they would object to being called 'chinaman', after all, that is just a descriptive.
The politically correct 'I WANT TO CONTROL THE WORDS YOU USE' crowd really should learn to lighten up a bit and not take themselves so seriously. If a chinaman comes forward and complains with a motivation as to why he/she feels insulted by this term then that would be early enough to adapt, until that time I don't think they need everybody and their brother to speak for them.
copying the wikipedia concept is not creative in any way shape or form.
they lost their near monopoly. IBM used to be the dominant force in enterprise computing. Basically there were three parties at the time, IBM, Sperry-Rand and Data-General, roughly corresponding to Microsoft, Apple and Linux today in terms of marketshare.
It took a decade and a half of consistent decline and a lot of kicking and screaming by IBM and it's fanboys of days long gone before the hold they had over the market was finally broken. Then there was a rash of 'mini' and PC based solutions, the enabler of which was - ironically - IBM's own PC and the products of a little upstart named Compaq, powered by todays 600 Lbs gorilla Microsoft.
the interesting thing here is that google does not seem to have learned *anything* from the youtube/google video lesson. :) Or maybe google doesn't like the creative commons much because it stops them from 'owning' the product.
Instead of buying the established market leader and making the best of it they have now decided to go and try to unseat the market leader. This will fail, after which said market leader will be in a *much* stronger position. Or maybe wikipedia wasn't for sale
breaking news: phones can play mp3's... so the phone is *both* media player and cellphone. Amazing isn't it ?
In other words, it makes perfect sense to have a large flash in your cellphone. Parent was talking about upgrading a windows based phone, NOT an iphone.
wouldn't that be against the DMCA ? ;)
> I'd bet that someone out there is going to die on a daily basis because a scan is postponed.
:)
someone is going to die at most once, not on a daily basis
Also, they'll likely only die *earlier*, I seriously doubt they were going to avoid being at their own funeral in the first place.
how on earth is this flamebait ?
You'd have to filter out the 'dead' (fissioned) material because otherwise you'd be running a very real risk of giving a patient a wrong dose. Most of this stuff is done on a milligrams / bodyweight basis, stockpiling it for any length of time would throw off the dosage schemes in a terrible way.
exactly. This ISP should lose common carrier status immediately. They can no longer claim that they are just 'passing on the data', as of today they are 100% liable for the effects of *any* traffic on their networks.
it'd be hard to bomb them into the stone age though :) Joking aside, I wonder if it wouldn't be easier for the iranians to rent a bit of time on EC2 or one of it's ilk.
And that tends to change on how you define an embryo. According to some an embryo is a fertilized ovum, according to others it is a partically developed organism that stands a fair chance of being carried to term. The line is blurry and as with all of natures works it defies definition and can not be caught in a simple binary category. It's a continuum, just like 'tall' and 'hot'. Some collections of cells are more of an embryo than others, with a 'peak' of 'embryoness' somewhere in those magical 9 months. A born baby is not an embryo, a fertilized ovum probably also isn't one.